Pollster Mainstreet Research has issued a mea culpa for a “catastrophic miss” after it failed to predict Calgary’s mayoral election, wrongly forecasting that incumbent Naheed Nenshi trailed challenger Bill Smith by a wide margin days before the vote.

Commissioned by Postmedia, several Mainstreet polls attracted controversy throughout the race. Nenshi’s team routinely disputing the findings, but the incumbent answered any doubt about his electoral chances with a resounding victory Monday night.

“We have called (nearly) every election for the past five years correctly across Canada, across Alberta, but we got this one wrong,” said Mainstreet chief executive Quito Maggi.

“It was a catastrophic failure. I will spare no expense; I will leave no stone unturned until I find out why it happened and how it happened.”

Pollster failures to predict the election of Donald Trump south of the border and several Canadian races, including Alison Redford’s 2012 victory in Alberta and Nenshi’s third contest, are eroding public trust in surveys, said political scientist Lori Williams.

“(Polls) can tell people whether the race is close and whether it’s worth a lot of trouble to get out and vote,” said Williams, who found some degree of error in the way all publicly released polls were collected during the race.

“We’ve had enough inaccurate polls north and south of the border that people are really starting to be skeptical about their accuracy, and fair enough.”

Several pundits raised questions about what they considered to be red flags in Mainstreet’s surveys, including an early October poll that suggested young voters who are traditionally Nenshi supporters were flocking to Smith.

The same poll gave Smith a 17 percentage point lead over Nenshi. A Mainstreet survey collected during the last week of the campaign suggested the race had narrowed, with Smith’s lead falling to 11 points.

Two other polls conducted by different groups reached very different conclusions. A Forum Research online poll conducted from Sept. 28 to Oct. 12 gave Nenshi a 17-point lead over Smith, while another online survey by Asking Canadians in early October gave the incumbent a 15-point edge.

In the end, Nenshi walked away from the divisive race with 51 per cent support to Smith’s 43.7, a nearly seven-point difference.

Polls showing Smith in the lead likely helped solidify the challenger as a legitimate threat, making it easier to raise money and attract volunteers, said pollster Marc Henry of ThinkHQ Public Affairs, who conducted internal polling during the race.

The surveys may also have convinced Nenshi’s supporters he was in danger, causing them to show up at the polls in droves.

Like other observers, Henry said Mainstreet appears to have misread Nenshi’s support among younger voters, who were once again a major source of his electoral success.

Henry said his internal polling suggested that Nenshi had a 20-point lead among decided voters and saw that gap narrow as he lost ground during a nasty slugfest. But among voters aged 18 to 34, the mayor still had a 50-point lead Monday night, Henry said.

Nenshi’s base also includes many inner-city residents and northeast neighbourhoods, which are demographics that don’t traditionally vote as often as others, Henry said. But his team got supporters to the polls in large numbers.

“One of the flaws with (automated telephone) polling is they really don’t have a good measure of who the most likely voters are,” Henry said. “This was a peculiar election that this particular methodology was not well-suited in measuring.”

Mainstreet’s Maggi defended his firm’s methodology, arguing it used the same techniques to accurately predict the outcome of the Edmonton civic election, along with several other races conducted in Alberta in recent years.

Still, he acknowledged, “something was weird and wonky that got it wrong in Calgary.”

Quito Maggi, CEO of Mainstreet Research.Postmedia

Maggi said his team has three theories that could explain their inaccurate polling, including that it may have been able to get better results by offering surveys in other languages, as it has in places like Toronto.

The Calgary surveys may have also not taken enough samples from households that don’t have land lines and use only cells, which tend to be younger, more urban and “hip,” Maggi said.

A final theory, which the pollster believes could be the most significant, suggests voters may have been fatigued by negative robo calls from Smith’s camp, perhaps turning Nenshi supporters off from answering the phone.

Mainstreet expects to compile a report in the next month or so that will attempt to answer what went wrong with its Calgary predictions.

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